Amy Licence: historian of the lives of Medieval, Tudor and early modern women; nineteenth and early twentieth century art, history, literature and culture; writer of literary ficton.

Sunday, 3 March 2013

All the Women We've Never Heard Of: Women's History Month.

March is Women’s History Month or International
Women’s Month, depending on whereabouts you are in the world. This is an interesting
recent innovation, coinciding with Women’s Day on March 8 and indicative of the
increasing social awareness of centuries, perhaps millennia, of female
marginalisation. In terms of historiography, the emancipation and study of
women’s lives really only moved into focus in the twentieth century.
Biographies of queens did exist before that time but they were typically the
products of a post-Romantic movement, focusing on figures whose lives had been
tragic or dramatic, like Mary, Queen of Scots or Anne Boleyn. A key innovator in
the study of women’s lives was Eileen Power, whose work on medieval women in
the 1920s made her one of the first to place them on the historical stage in their
own right, rather as appendages to their more important menfolk.

Joan of Arc

Since then, in the post-Feminist world, the emphasis
on the female experience has greatly increased in all fields of study. For
historians, the study of queenship in particular has blossomed as a valuable
genre, allowing exploration of important women beyond just their function as
child bearers or figures to distract men and be wedded or divorced. Significant
steps have been taken towards the evaluation of the contributions individual queens
made to national politics, the personal nature of their influence and how
certain women contributed to discourses of disaffection. In particular, we know
the names of women who caused trouble in the past, rather than those who towed
the line. Those who lived lives that did not show up in the legal records, who
avoided conflict, escaped terrible illnesses and died quietly in their beds are
still relatively unknown. This is partly a problem of documentation. The higher
up the social scale a woman was, or the more difficult she was in refusing or
failing to conform, the more paperwork she created. We know about the glorious
coronations of Queens, the rumours about their sexual behaviour and the
adoration they inspired. Figures such as the visionary Joan of Arc, Protestant
Martyr Anne Askew and the “holy maid” of Kent, prophetess, Elizabeth Barton,
along with others who suffered the ultimate price for their beliefs during the
Marian burnings or the Seventeenth Century witch trials, are well recorded. So
basically, if you were rich or naughty, you got noticed; do things ever change?

Yet, in terms of understanding the female
experience, historians have still only scratched the surface. A browse through
Amazon’s listings proves that tastes still veer towards the anointed queens and
mistresses of Kings. Our current examples would equate to the modern study of a
foreign country simply by analysing the lives of their celebrities. The
experiences of “average” women in the past are far less recoverable although
the existence of such an “average” or “typical” female life is as unlikely as
it is for women today. These are the women who appear on the margins of illuminated manuscripts, scattering corn to chickens, herding pigs or cutting corn. Continual narratives rarely exist for them, which is
unsurprising when we consider that even hugely famous women’s birthdates, like
those of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard are uncertain. They did not know they
were going to become famous, whereas the birthdates of Catherine of Aragon,
Mary I and Elizabeth I are practically carved in stone, so significant as they
were.

There seem to be two categories of women in the
past; the “famous” and the “other.” Often, only a slice of the lives of these
others exist, for example, when they fall foul of the courts or are married,
divorced or create some scandal, such as falling pregnant outside marriage.
That is, at the interface of where their lives clash with the legal and moral
codes of men. For Women’s history month, I would like to explore a few
experiences of those “others,” the millions and millions about whom little or
nothing is known, but whose existence was essential in roles behind the scenes
as administrators, facilitators, mediators, educators etc. These are the women
we have never heard of and some, no doubt, will question whether they are
worthy of study. The answer to this lies in female roles today: we are not all
Queens or martyrs. Modern women have many more opportunities than their
counterparts in the past and each life is different, shaped by individual
choice but we can only come close to understanding how our roles have evolved
by studying the breadth of female existence rather than the extremes. I suppose
it also depends on whether you think the human experience is an interesting
subject matter in itself. I do. These are a few of the women I have uncovered
whilst researching other things.

I love seeking out women from the past who have
broken the rules. Decades before the Reformation took hold, when the
seventeen-year-old Henry VIII succeeded to the throne of England as a good
Catholic, there were already criticisms raised against the trappings of
religion. In 1509, an Elizabeth
Sampson, or Simpson, of London visited the church of St Mary, Willesden. It had
long been associated with miracles, possibly named after an early healing
spring and by the late fifteenth century, was very popular.
Pilgrims visited from all over the country and carried away small phials of
holy water to cure all sorts of ills. The famous statue that stood within the
church was blackened by centuries of candle smoke and when Elizabeth visited
that year, she described the Black Madonna as a “burnt- tailed elf and a
burnt-tailed stock.” Then, she added that if the statue could not even take
care of itself it was not of much use to those who sought its aid. Elizabeth
was made to do penance for her criticism; probably declaring she was wrong and
swearing an oath in public, or even receiving lashes in the market place. What
made her speak out ? Elizabeth was from London and the church is now in the
north-west of the modern city, although in her day, it was a distant village
beyond the walls. Did Elizabeth have some particular purpose in making a
pilgrimage there? Did she hope for the intercession of saints for her health or
fertility, as the traditional association went? Perhaps she had already tried
some of the holy water and had not seen the results she had hoped for. This may
have been a personal response or an ideological one; was she an early critic of
the excesses of Catholicism, or reflecting an increasing discourse of satire
against those who exploited it? Only three years later Erasmus would produce
his famous satire on pilgrimage. We will never know what motivated Elizabeth.
She did her penance. Did she have a choice?

Next, a typical tale of
late sixteenth century illegitimacy developed around Sarah Smythe of Elm, Ely,
Cambridgeshire, who was at the centre of a paternity debate. In 1584, shoemaker
William Wylson of Brentwood, Essex, confessed to having fathered a child with
his servant Sarah. According to the Assize rolls, he claimed that “after
“divers and several times the use of her body”, Sarah became pregnant and
delivered a boy at the house of Wylson’s brother. Wylson was examined at the
time and acknowledged the child, declaring that he and Sarah were man and wife.
Sarah disagreed; she denied it and ran away. Still Wyslon did not give up but
pursued her and brought her back to Brentwood, whereupon she was questioned by
the justices and confessed that the child’s father was actually one Abraham
Smythe, another of Wylson’s servants who had absconded. Wylson was then
“absolved” of both woman and child. This case illuminates only a fragment of
the complex connections and legal implications of social and sexual relations
of the time. Wylson appears to have acted honourably for the most, despite
having had relations with his servant: as he was later calling her his wife, it
seems that this was consensual and the he was unaware of her relationship with
at least one other man. Abraham and Sarah Smythe were servants in the same household
with the same surname and may have been cousins or more distantly related. It
would have benefited Sarah socially to have accepted Wylson as her husband but
either love or her conscience dictated otherwise. The case raises questions as
to her motives in entering a sexual relationship with her master and the degree
to which she had a choice; also it seems that Sarah and Abraham were able to
find some privacy on at least one occasion and that Wylson was ignorant of the
behaviour and morals of his own servants. There is of course, the possibility
that Sarah was not telling the truth, accusing a man she desired and who was
not present to testify in his defence but that opens more questions than the
records of this case can answer.

It’s always interesting
when women get accused of using speech as a weapon. One court roll of High
Roding in the early Sixteenth century, requested the removal from the village
of a woman named Agnes for being a “common scold” and “disturber of the peace
to the great annoyance of her neighbours.” At Barking in 1581, the wives of
Edmund Body and Geoffrey Wood were reported as “common scolds”, as was Matilda
Glascock of Becontree in 1575, although no punishment was recorded. It is
difficult not to wonder what they said; it was likely to have been something
that damaged the good reputation or “common fame” of an individual that was
considered so valuable at the time. This must have been part of a long-running
dispute between neighbours, which reached a head when one was deemed to have
overstepped the mark. Yet it was clearly a common problem, which men loathed. Bald’s
Leechbook contained a cure against a woman’s chatter: the advice to eat a
radish at night whilst fasting and one the next day, to ensure the chatter
cannot harm you, suggests a real belief in the possibility of tangible harm
being done through speech, either bodily, or to a man’s reputation. The
potential overlap of female disobedience, secrecy and witchcraft becomes even
more apparent in the pseudo-religious advice of receipt books and almanacs. Men
might make a salve “against women with whom the devil copulated”, using hops,
wormwood, lupin, vervain, garlic, fennel and other ingredients. They should place
these in a vat under an altar, sing nine masses over it, boil it in butter and
sheep’s grease, add holy salt and strain the liquid through a cloth into
running water. The man who anointed himself with this salve would be saved from
“evil temptation”. With the majority of women being so powerless in legal terms
and voiceless through illiteracy, this social silencing was particularly
brutal.

Some of the saddest
cases I have come across have featured infanticides. I originally had a section
on this in my first book “In Bed with the Tudors” but I found it so upsetting
that I took it out. When you study pregnancy and childbirth, there are
inevitably sad stories. In this case though, it seems that a stillbirth was
mistaken for murder. In May 1566, Margaret Cybson of Writtle, Essex, wife of a
labourer, was accused of killing her newborn son. Thirteen men gave their oath
that Margaret had given birth at home between the hours of eleven and twelve at
night on the last day of March, then took the child and threw it down the well
on the green, known as “Greneburie” where it drowned. The child was neither
baptised nor named. At the Chelmsford Assizes that July she was found not
guilty, with the judge ruling that the child had been dead when born. How
exactly did this verdict come about? It may have been a question of gender. Margaret’s
accusers were male. Perhaps the women who actually attended her birth were able
to verify her version of events, marking a real divide between their knowledge
and male supposition and suspicion, as they were traditionally excluded from
the birth room. We cannot help but wonder why Margaret was accused with such
certainty or exactly how these men thought they had gained their information.
Even given the late hour of her delivery, Margaret’s female network would have
been on alert and ready to attend her, if indeed she had one. There must have
been some women with poor social connections, marginalised by choice, distance,
necessity or social tensions who lacked this support. Somehow Margaret was able
to convince the justices that what the men may have witnessed was the disposal
of a body rather than a murder. And where was her husband in all this? Whatever
the circumstances, relations between the Cybsons and their neighbours cannot
have been easy after such an accusation.

Some women were making
their mark in the medical profession too, albeit unofficially. Two female
practitioners in late Sixteenth century London came to the attention of the
authorities for their activities. A Thomasina Scarlett made her first
appearance in December 1588,when she admitted giving emetics and medicines to
in excess of a hundred people and agreed to cease practice. However it seems
she did not. For many, lacking the essential funds for a male doctor, such
women with their knowledge of herbal treatments represented the only attention
they could access; the numbers of Thomasina’s patients testify to her good reputation.
Some time before 1595, she was in trouble again and imprisoned, for in February
that year, she obtained a letter from “various people of rank” requesting her
release. It was denied. Only a week later, still in prison, she confessed to
having administered an ointment and purge to a Mr Neeme, despite being
illiterate and having no knowledge of the theory of medicine. When pressed, she
“utterly refused” to refrain from practice. She was imprisoned again and fined
in 1598, 1603, 1610 and 1611. After this, she disappears from the records. More
successful was an Alice Leevers, described in April 1586 as an “unskilled and
demented old woman who had long practised medicine,” who had the backing of
Lord Hunsdon despite having made “errors, harms and offences” in the past. At her
appearance before the court, she made the unusual step of asking to admitted as
a member of the College of Physicians. In deference to her aristocratic patron,
despite the court’s guilty verdict, Alice was permitted to administer external
medicine and perform non-dangerous surgery.

The great period of witchcraft accusations and
trials was the seventeenth century. Yet, this was always a critical part of the
misogynistic dialogue that underpinned gender relations in the past. Such
accusations were difficult to substantiate and prove; even if a claim was
thrown out of court, the associated mud could stick. Royal women and commoners
could suffer alike from this. In 1481, soon after the accusations made against
Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester, Jacquetta of Luxembourg and
Elizabeth Wydeville, a London woman was brought to the bar under similar
charges. Named as a sorceress or sortilege, she had reputedly used magic to win
lovers for herself, two of whom had nearly killed each other. Her husband lived
in terror of her and she had tried to resort to poison when her spells had
failed. Her fate is not recorded.

I could go on. As I research, the names of hundreds
of women appear on the pages of court records, letters, accounts and manuals.
Their complete lives are beyond my grasp but in these small anecdotes, they can
be briefly glimpsed in their moments of conflict, which were just one part of
their continuing struggle for survival. These are the “others,” all the women
of the past we’ve never heard of. And of course, there are all the rest, of
whom we will never hear: our great, great, great, great etc grandmothers.

2 comments:

Great post Amy. I'm amazed at what you are finding in the records. I've always heard how suspicious people were back then but that potion you mention really brings it home. And it's good to know the judge listened to the women in the case of the still born child. This is really fascinating stuff. :)

Thanks Susan. It's amazing what is out there. When we hear the same famous names recurring over and over again, it makes me wonder how representative they are of the female experience generally and whether our perceptions of the past may be a bit skewed. Yes, I like that the judge listened too- there are lots of surprises in the records. Thanks for your kind comment.

About Me

Writing about medieval and Tudor history, with a particular interest in women's lives and experiences.
I'm the author of four books and have also written for The Guardian, TLS, BBC History website, The New Statesman, The Huffington Post, The English Review and The London Magazine. I appeared in a BBC2 documentary "The Real White Queen and her Rivals" and have been interviewed numerous times live on radio. I've also been shortlisted twice for the Asham Award for women's short fiction.
@PrufrocksPeach